Christ in Yaqui Garb: Teresa Urrea’s Christian Theology and Ethic

Abstract

A healer, Mexican folk saint, and revolutionary figurehead, Teresa Urrea exhibited a deeply inculturated Christianity. Yet in academic secondary literature and historical fiction that has arisen around Urrea, she is rarely examined as a Christian exemplar. Seen variously as an exemplary feminist, chicana, Yaqui, curandera, and even religious seeker, Urrea’s self-identification with Christ is seldom foregrounded. Yet in a 1900 interview, Urrea makes that relation to Christ explicit. Indeed, in her healing work, she envisioned herself emulating Christ. She understood her abilities to be given by God. She even followed an ethic which she understood to be an emulation of Christ. Closely examining that interview, this essay argues that Urrea’s explicit theology and ethic is, indeed, a deeply indigenized Christianity. It is a Christianity that has attended closely to the religion’s central figure and sought to emulate him. Yet it is also a theology and ethic that emerged from her own social and geographic location and, in particular, the Yaqui social imaginary. Urrea’s theology and ethics—centered on the person of Christ—destabilized the colonial order and forced those who saw her to see Christ in Yaqui, female garb.

1. Introduction

In the summer of 1900, a young woman sat for an interview in a foreign land. Just a few years prior, a miraculous event sparked her divinely led mission, and she developed a remarkable and far-reaching ministry that shook her home country with miracles and hope. Her affluent father thought her a religious fanatic, but among the needy, she was seen as God’s worker and messenger. Yet she departed that comfortable home for a land where she knew neither language nor customs. Her fame preceded her, and the natives she encountered were enthralled not only by her healings but by her unusual and attractive appearance. By means of this remarkable young woman, it seemed that God had arrived through his healing agent. What had begun upon her father’s fashionable estate crossed national boundaries. She was, after all, a kind of healing missionary, forsaking her homeland to share God’s love abroad with all whom she encountered.

This young woman was Teresa Urrea, revered among the Yaqui, Mayo, and Tomochitecos in Sonora and Chihuahua as la Santa de Cabora. The Mexican government exiled her to the United States for denouncing their oppressive treatment of Amerindians, and many of her Amerindian devotees invoked her name as they violently revolted against the state. As a political exile, she continued her remarkable life and healing work. In this context, reporter Helen Dare interviewed Urrea in San Jose, California. Even though she was herself skeptical of religion, Dare stood in awe of this young woman known widely as a saint. Urrea was, however, no less a “saint” to Dare, a laborer for Amerindian justice in the United States. To Dare, Urrea appeared as an exemplary figure—a “saint”—for Amerindian liberation.

Indeed, Urrea has been widely seen as an exemplar for a wide variety of causes.1 Nevertheless, this paper contends that Urrea cannot be circumscribed to scholarly hagiographical paradigms. Her epistemic framework was bound to her own geographic and social location and movement. Contemporary scholars are tempted to type her experience as a kind of liminality; Urrea sat on the borders of Amerindian religion and Christianity, Mexico and the US, colonial flourishing and colonial poverty.2 Such accounts forget, however, that Urrea experienced the world not from foreign academic categories but from her own epistemic framework. What we might see as liminality was, to her, simply her life. Such an insight—while in fact quite basic—ought to be crucial for methodology in the field of World Christianity. Urrea’s apparent hybridity and marginal religious and social location ought not suggest that she herself was marginal but, instead, ought to reveal the unsteady underpinnings of the categories themselves. The categories, it seems, are largely unhelpful for studying Urrea. Yet this fact should not discourage the field of World Christianity whose scholars study figures who are often, at once, deeply Christian yet difficult for many in the Western Christian world to accept. Instead, the fact reveals that World Christianity scholars need to approach figures like Urrea by way of the figures’ self-understandings.

For Urrea, her self-understanding is difficult to access. This lack of accessibility seems odd—born in the 1870s, there are photographs, newspaper clippings, and a history of popular devotion. The stories are only a few generations old, and those who have investigated her have interviewed her “friends and relatives.”3 Nevertheless, beyond Dare’s record, Urrea’s own words are scant, and she was popularly canonized so quickly that she assumed a legendary status even while still a young girl. Nearly all of the stories about Urrea have a hagiographical style—even the accounts in secular newspapers and surely the most influential biography. In a sense, the young woman Teresita and la Santa de Cabora are not precisely one and the same. In this paper, I utilize the names Teresita and la Santa to distinguish between the woman’s terrestrial, embodied existence on the one hand and hagiographical perceptions of her on the other. The latter is replete in both primary and secondary literature, but the former is elusive. The woman Teresita, however, can be found in Dare’s 1900 interview.

For these reasons, this essay attends primarily to Dare’s interview largely without recourse to other “histories” of Urrea (notably, Holden’s “historical novel” Teresita).4 It is an exploration of how Urrea narrated her own history; in so doing, Teresita presented a theology and ethic drawn from the emulation of Christ and rooted in local culture. It seeks to recover the woman in her own words, and in so doing, the essay seeks to exemplify a way of studying deeply inculturated Christianities beyond the Anglophone Western world that privilege the distinct epistemologies of the religious actors without utterly circumscribing them to foreign categories. It reveals Urrea’s sense of divine calling, self-perception, boundary-crossing, and inculturated theology. Even as she goes from South to North promulgating a kind of folk Catholicism indebted to indigenous religious practices and curanderismo, she certainly seems akin to a “missionary.” Yet she is her own person, unable to be circumscribed by a foreign category, bound to the land and experiences in which Christ has been revealed within her.

2. A Saint in a Cottage

Though one of the best insights into Teresita’s own mind, Dare’s words are, of course, framed around her own perception of la Santa.5 Dare introduces her with a measure of bravado:

That self-same Santa Teresa who has been worshiped as a guide from heaven by the Indians of Mexico on our southern borders; who has been credited with miraculous healing powers; who was thrown into prison in Mexico charged with causing an uprising of the Yaqui Indians… that self-same Santa Teresa is now in California.6

(Dare 1900, p. 213)

She recites Teresita’s story twice and, between the two highly decorated narratives, inserts the fact of Teresita’s current residence “in a modest, cosy, commonplace, white-painted cottage at 235 North Seventh Street, San Jose.” 7 The grand has entered the “commonplace”; la Santa de Cabora resides in a modest San Jose home. In the former narrative, Dare emphasizes la Santa’s fame across Mexico and the Southwest United States; and in the latter rendition, she provides more specific details of the charges of the Mexican government against her, the devotedness of the Yaqui and Tomochic peoples, and the “Indians and ignorant Mexicans making a great rejoicing over her.”8 The young woman is a religious and revolutionary celebrity, but she now speaks humbly and simply to a reporter in San Jose. Dare presents her, in a sense, like the Christ child in the stable; how could someone so grand come to a place like this?

Dare’s introduction to la Santa seems hagiographical. La Santa de Cabora is a magnanimous figure for Dare. Could this just be journalistic or orientalizing rhetoric, or does Dare see in Urrea a figure who is exemplary of something? Is she, to Dare, a kind of saint? Records of Dare’s work advocating for Amerindian justice suggest that she likely perceived la Santa. Yet this saint was primarily a saint for Amerindian justice.

Twenty-two years after the publication of this article, Dare appeared before the Committee on Indian Affairs in the US House of Representatives. In the proceedings, she states that she reported on meetings between the Indian Board of Cooperation and US government representatives. She received a modest expense stipend from the Board during the months she remained in Washington, D.C. doing her journalism, but she engaged in the work voluntarily, having advocated for California Indians for thirty years. Notably, she contends against an aid bill for the Indians arguing, quoting the wishes of the Board, that the Indians desire and ought to receive justice rather than aid. Having had their land annexed by the US government, the aid the Committee wants to give would not rightly reconcile the parties.9 While this hearing took place more than twenty years after the interview, it seems clear that Dare politically favored Amerindian communities. That insight perhaps sheds light on why she seems to regard Urrea so highly.

Dare was a kind of hagiographer. In her own description, La Santa de Cabora is a “saint” of Amerindian justice. It is no wonder that La Santa de Cabora, “who was thrown into prison in Mexico charged with causing an uprising of the Yaqui Indians… [and] banished from Mexico for the same reason…”10 would appear as such a remarkable—even holy—figure to Dare.

Additionally—perhaps in contradiction to the rhetoric of militarized rebellion—Dare portrays the young woman as the exemplification of femininity. By 1900, such descriptions have become standard for la Santa.11 Dare elaborates on image of la Santa and yet repeats some of these adjectives word for word. She describes la Santa’s gait as “soft, swift, gliding,” her hands as “long[,] slender,” her voice as “soft-spoken,” her body as “tall, slender, flat-chested, fragile, dark-skinned.” “Tall” and “slender”—even slenderness of hand—became standard, even holy, descriptions of Teresita as she is transformed into a type of saint. 12 Nevertheless, “flat-chested” seems odd in such a feminine description. Dare is perhaps simply describing the woman’s appearance, and yet the details she relates are telling. “Flat-chested” may portray the manliness of the woman. That manliness, while contradicting her femininity, corresponds precisely to la Santa as the warrior.13 She is the saint of Tomochic rebellion and courage against the Mexican military. Thus, this masculine detail should not be overlooked. The young woman appears as a contradiction.14—the Joan of Arc-esque warrior Santa and the “fragile” Teresita. That said, these figures are not too distinct. La Santa de Cabora is identified with Teresita’s body. The descriptors designate one body even as they portray two seemingly distinct Teresas. The two—the saint and young woman—are distinct yet simultaneously self-same. The description both describes Teresa’s body and constructs the distinct Teresas. Through the description of Teresa’s body and the replication of the description time and again, the representation of la Santa becomes identified with the young woman’s very flesh.

Dare herself, obviously enchanted by Urrea, remains incredulous to the faith claims about her. “Whether Santa Teresa is a healer or not it is not given to me to know—nature has not endowed me with faith… one cannot deny her respect, even when faith is not convinced.”15 Dare is simply a reporter, and yet her depiction of Teresita portrayed the woman as holy and other. For Dare, la Santa is an icon in the most religious sense: la Santa is a window into another world. In one sense, this iconographic sensibility appears to be a kind of orientalizing rhetoric, but, albeit Dare’s sentimentality and (perhaps) miscomprehension, la Santa truly reveals an alternate world. She reflects a different social imaginary. In one sense, she reveals the world of Amerindian people, and yet, nevertheless, that world is not simply hers. She reveals, in her interview, the foundations of her social imaginary. Teresita does not conceive of society, theology, ethics, or her very own self in the same manner as Dare. Dare, therefore, is ushered into a world of Amerindians, Curanderismo, Catholicism, Mexican oppression, revolution and, certainly, into the distinct theological and ethical notions of this young yet well-traveled woman. In all this, Dare perceives a uniqueness in the young woman. She both perceives and places a paradigm of saintliness upon her—she is la Santa de Cabora. And yet Urrea was not merely the conjunction of these identities; she maintained her own distinct epistemology.

Viewing her iconographically, Dare furthermore sees la Santa as the ideal Amerindian liberator. She is a saint of Amerindian politics, and thus Dare, herself cognizant of the injustice to which her own government has subjected Californian Amerindians, finds an icon through which Amerindian political revolt has been realized (i.e., brought into existence). That image, however, is rejected by Teresita herself—she is not an Amerindian political liberator but (seemingly) simply a healer.

3. In Her Own Words

3.1. Translation

Obviously, there are serious impediments to hearing Teresita’s own voice in Dare’s account. While Dare’s journalistic integrity is probably trustworthy, the interview is still filtered through Dare. Dare both wrote the words and chose what to emphasize, omit, elaborate upon, and summarize. This interview provides only glimpses into the woman’s inner world and self-understanding. Moreover, it is a translated work:

Santa Teresa speaks only Spanish, and Mrs. A. C. Fessler, whose guest she is and whose daughter’s little child they believe she saved from death, interpreted for me the first full story of her strange life that Santa Teresa has told to be printed.16

Nevertheless, unlike most sources available, this representation is not the passing down of lore; the icon takes up voice in Dare’s account. Thus, directly after Dare has introduced la Santa with a rhetorically rich account of her life and reputation, Teresita begins to speak (perhaps with so little rhetorical flair that we should consider faulting the translator or Dare).

3.2. Teresita’s Early Life

Teresita straightforwardly narrates her life: she gives her age (twenty-eight), birthplace (Sinaloa), parentage (confirming her illegitimate birth and parents’ vastly unequal power relations). Then with her education, we begin to glimpse her atypical self-understanding:

I went to school when I was nine years old, but I did not want to study; but later I felt I wanted to know how to read, and I learned my alphabet from a very, very old lady. My writing came to me of itself. I wanted to write, and I wrote, but how I learned I don’t know, for I was not taught. On the floor of my mother’s house I first wrote with my little finger in the dust.17

Though remarkable to Teresita, aversion to study is typical for children. She learned to read, but writing, in her perspective, was a skill quite distinct from writing. Nevertheless, she could write, but since she never formally learned writing, she interpreted her writing ability as mysterious, or perhaps even, miraculous. Indeed, she spoke subtly, but she seemed to allude to her writing ability as a kind of miracle, suggesting an emerging sense of her own uniqueness.

The inclusion of this story in such a short narrative suggests that it was important for Teresita’s self-understanding. She was an unusual young girl who had a gift. Moreover, her account alludes to another figure with an unusual self-understanding. In the story of the woman caught in adultery (John 8), Jesus bends down and writes in the dirt. Again, this allusion to Christ suggests that not only others perceived her Christ-figuring, but she herself saw the similarity. In retrospect, her ability to write seems to have signified an element of Christ-like uniqueness for herself.

3.3. Migration and Transformation

Immediately following this allusion to Christ, Teresita tells her trance narrative. Foreshadowing her future life of constant transience, the trance began after her move to her father’s hacienda in Cabora at the age of sixteen. As a young girl, she had left the home she knew and traveled far away to a new place with its own customs—as one can see in her description of her new home: “It was adobe, the walls inside white and painted part of the way up as they paint them in Sonora.”18 Why would she include this kind of detail—seemingly of so little importance—in an account of her life? In The Yaquis: A Cultural History, Edward Spicer contends that the Yaqui social imaginary holds a kind of binary between huya aniya and pweplo. In essence, before the coming of Europeans, Yaquis understood the world to be huya aniya—what Europeans might call the “natural world.” Yet even Yaqui architecture was natural in the sense that it fit as part of nature’s whole. With the coming of Europeans, towns and European architecture —pweplo—entered the Yaqui social imaginary.19 These buildings and manners of human-made construction contrasted with huya aniya. The inclusion of architectural details may reflect Teresita’s perceived strangeness of social location—at sixteen, she began crossing borders, and she entered a world with a different social imaginary than the one in which she had previously lived. Her sense of self and place were altered. She was, in her own self-understanding, a strange girl, and, suddenly, she was thrust into a strange place.

“There for three months and eighteen days I was in a trance.”20 In a strange place, her own strangeness became all the more pronounced. Here, there seems to be an easy contemporary explanation: in the shock of migration, Teresita broke down psychologically for over three months.21

I know nothing of what I did in that time. They tell me, those who saw, that I could move about but that they had to feed me; that I talked strange things about God and religion, and people came to me… and I put my hands on them [and] they got well. Of this I remember nothing, but when I came to myself I saw they were well.22

Her lack of memory suggests trauma, but it is notable that she presents few details other than the description of the house and what people said about her words and actions.23 The migration from one world to another—from huya aniya to pweplo—certainly affected her psychologically; though it is difficult to measure those effects precisely.

Her own narrative reveals that regardless of how her trance was caused, it transformed her in a deeply religious sense. One of the most salient comparisons is the deathbed visions of Julian of Norwich. It was not merely a calling or conversion, but, for both women, it was a period of personal transformation where she became a saint (though not officially).24 For Julian, she lived the remainder of her life in a cell, reflecting on her visions and aiding the pilgrims who came to her. For Teresita, she received the power to heal, and people then flocked to her and invoked her in prayer.25 The trance, indeed, transformed her into something else—perhaps la Santa de Cabora—and she recognized the event’s religious significance even if the cause seemed mysterious.

Teresita therefore interpreted her trance as a religious transformation: “I felt a change in me. I could still if I touched people or rubbed them make them well. I felt in me only the wish to do good in the world. I spoke much to the people about God…”26 The trance indeed altered Teresita, and, here, she transformed into the one whom others recognized as a saint. Teresita entered her father’s strange house as a young girl, and though she may have already been developing a sense of her own uniqueness, the trance changed her, and she was enabled to heal, filled with a desire to “do good,” and began talking about God. Analogically, as John the Baptist submerged Jesus in the Jordan, so was Teresita submerged into a culturally new world, and for both figures, they emerged changed.

3.4. Teresita’s Theology

At this point, we begin to glimpse Teresita’s theology. Immediately upon telling Dare of her speaking “to the people about God,” she qualifies her sense and gives content to her particular theology:

I spoke much to the people about God—not about the church, or to tell them to go to church, but about God. I told them what I believe: that God is the spirit of love; that we who are in the world must love one another and live in peace; otherwise we offend God.27

Teresita did not see her work and calling as ecclesial. She was neither trying to teach nor reform Christianity, and thus her sainthood was always popular rather than official. She was neither an instrument of the Roman Catholic Church nor a figure like Catherine of Siena. She, moreover, did not turn to Protestant Christianity and, it does not seem that she maintained official Catholic connections during her exile.28 She stood beyond the church’s control. Nevertheless, her work and calling were decidedly theological in its most basic sense and orientation; she was gifted and called by God. She, moreover, even envisioned herself doing “as Christ did.”29 Indeed, as is evident in the coming description of her theology, Christian ideas play pivotal roles.

Yet like the saintly paradigms which fail to adequately describe Teresita, her theology cannot be simply explained by Christian influences. To this end, Yaqui religion and Curanderismo can help explain her theology. Yaqui religion of this time period has been called a “new religion” that formed at the conjunction of pre-colonial Yaqui religion and Jesuit Catholicism.30 Furthermore, Teresita’s theology reflects Curanderismo which “is not so much a discrete religious system as a logical extension of popular Catholicism.”31 Her theology does not (and need not) fit any of these theologies precisely, but as her theology sits along a continuum of these practices, each of them are helpful dialogue partners in discerning the shape of her theology—though Teresita is circumscribed by none of them.

Regarding her healing powers, she says, “I feel it is given me from God.”32 And “God,” for Teresita, is most basically “the spirit of love.” God’s identity as the “spirit of love” produces a corresponding ethic: “we… must love one another and live in peace.”33 Teresita “believe[s]” that God—who is not identified with the church—is love, and humans therefore ought to love one another. She realizes this ethic in two ways through healing and admitting offense and asking forgiveness. This ethic is further framed by her understanding of “God’s laws.”

3.4.1. Healing: Power, Desire, Action

First, Teresita’s healing ability, “the power to do good,” was precisely how she realized this ethic of love. She demonstrated her belief in God’s love, and the spiritual love became physically realized through her healings.34 Whereas God is love spiritually, “the power to do good” is the physical instantiation of that spiritual love. Teresita, in this way, even had a Christological sense of her call. In her words, she was “[h]appy to do as Christ did.”35 Though she imagined her work as outside of the confines and grips of the Christian church, she was not only called by God, but she, indeed, followed the example of Christ. In healing, she incarnated divine love. She, quite literally, saw herself as enfleshing the divine “spirit of love.”36 In so doing, Teresita saw her own life corresponding to Jesus:

“I have cured many people… sometimes I cured two hundred in a day.”

“And were you happy?” [Dare] asked.

“Si, Señora,” she said, “happy and grateful—but not proud. Happy to do as Christ did.”37

As Christ healed the sick, so did Teresita. These healings correspond to her sense of divine call and even suggest that she saw Christ’s own calling as divine—like she herself, Christ mediated “the spirit of love” through his body. Her Christ, however, did not necessarily correspond to the church’s Christ; nor, though, was it necessarily an alternative depiction of Christ. From the interview, there is simply too little information to know whether she thought Christ himself was divine. What is clear from the interview, however, is that God is “the spirit of love,” Teresita herself did “as Christ did” in her own work as a healer, God had empowered her to heal, she desired to heal, and, of course, her healings were often understood to be effective.38

God, “the spirit of love,” became enfleshed inasmuch as power was mediated through her body.39 Remarkably, Teresita was often (but not always) able to see the location of sickness in individuals’ bodies “as if I was looking through a window.” 40 From this sight, she transferred power from her own self to the one seeking healing. Admittedly, she was not as explicit in conveying how this worked, but it can be intuited from one of her statements. Concerning those who seek her healing out of “curiosity” rather than “faith” in her,41 she said, “Sometimes I feel this power that is in me come back when I send it to them, but I try again.” When healing, she extended her divinely given power to the body of the one seeking healing. Notably, this account is also reminiscent of Christ: “Someone touched me; for I noticed that power had gone out of me” (Luke 8:46).

Teresita was God’s “instrument,” and, like Jesus, she passed the power within her through touch:42

“When I cure with my hands I do like this,” and she took [Dare’s] hands in hers… and placed her thumbs against [Dare’s]…

“Sometimes… I rub; sometimes I give also medicines or lotions that I make from herbs I gather. I pray, too, not with the lips, but I lift up my spirit to God for help to do his will on earth.”43

When healing, Teresita joined hands with the one seeking healing “holding with a close, nervous grasp” (according to Dare).44 Along with touching, she utilized different means to actualize the healing. Even as she prayed (though not audibly) she rubbed or administered medicines; even as she administered medicines she prayed. Unlike many of her contemporaries in the Divine Healing Movement in the US, she found the means of physical and spiritual healing to not mutually exclude each other. Whereas, many Protestant faith healers utterly rejected the use of medicine or any means besides faith, Teresita utilized both together.45 Physical touch, the use of herbs, and non-vocally “lift[ing] up [her] spirit to God” all stewed together in her healing practices.46 God is spiritual, but God’s power, it seemed, was made physical through Teresita’s body and material means (medicines, herbs, etc.). Thus was she a type of incarnation.

Luis León’s ethnographic research in “Soy una Curandera y Soy una Católica” provides an example of a mass-going curandera whose theology fits neatly with Teresita’s practices. Hortencia, the curandera, reasoned thusly for using material things in order to help people: “Take water, for example. Water is a material [materia]. Water is made by God. Man didn’t make water… rocks… are not made by man but are made from nature [la naturaleza].”47 Material things belong to the natural world (perhaps even the huya aniya) and are thus from God. How, therefore, could natural things not be used in healing practices? Where Teresita departs from Protestant faith healing notions, she fits neatly with curanderismo.

God, Teresita believed, endowed her with a peculiar power to heal, and she moreover had the desire to heal, and the power and desire were realized through her action. In other words, Teresita had the “power to do good” (gift), and, indeed, she “wishe[d] to do good” (desire), and indeed she did the good (action) in her healings.48 This too matches neatly with curanderismo. The legendary story of being taught curanderismo from an old woman was not confirmed in Teresita’s own account,49 but she, nevertheless, demonstrated sensibilities which have been reflected in curanderismo. Strikingly, Hortencia said, “I do what I can do to help the people [la gente]. And, well, perhaps that is why God, he helps me, because he sees my desire to do the good.”50 Like Teresita, Hortencia imagined her healing powers as a divinely given gift, and she therefore desired to use them “to do good”—even if the church did not want her to do so.51

3.4.2. Offense and Forgiveness: Living in Peace

Second, this ethic of love requires peaceful co-habitation—unfortunately, an ideal which seems rarely realized in Teresita’s own narrative. When people fail to “love one another and live in peace,” they “offend God.”52 She therefore maintained a view of God as spirit capable of being offended by humans. This offense, of course, is caused by humans’ failure to love one another. “[L]iv[ing] in peace” involves a particular response to offense, namely, admitting fault and asking forgiveness: “When I offend I say to the one whom I have pained: ‘Sister or brother, I have offended you. I ask forgiveness.’”53 Offense comes through the failure to love, but admission of fault and asking forgiveness appears, in this text, as a key tenet of Teresita’s theology and corresponding ethic. It was a tenet, however, complicated by the Yaqui revolution.

As Dare noted earlier in the piece, the Mexican government had imprisoned Teresita for her role in the Yaqui revolution,54 and therefore Dare, herself concerned with Amerindian justice, asked Teresita to speak on her involvement. Having envisioned Teresita as an Amerindian revolutionary figurehead, Dare may have been disappointed with Teresita’s response: “I had nothing to do with the Yaqui revolution… I have cured the Indians and they love me for it, but I do not tell them to make revolutions.”55 The Yaqui invoked her due to her miraculous healings, but she says she did not provoke violent revolt. Teresita sought to distance herself from “Joan of Arc”-esque perceptions. Furthermore, her self-depiction is reminiscent of Teresita’s theology and ethic: “we who are in the world must love one another and live in peace.”56 Teresita was not necessarily denying the Yaqui’s right to their land, but she rejected their means of attaining justice. According to Teresita’s ethic, justice begins from the place of the offender rather than the offended. The primary response to offense is the offender’s admission of offense and request for forgiveness. As the Yaqui were the offended party, their revolutionary response could not, by Teresita’s ethic, properly restore love and peace. Of course, Teresita’s particular ethic is either misunderstood or disregarded by Amerindian revolutionaries. Despite her own admonitions and their reverence for her, her ethic was deemed unsatisfactory for bringing about the justice needed. Nevertheless, Teresita was indeed a leader for these revolutionaries even if in fomenting revolution, they did not follow her ethic. “Because the people followed me I was put in prison in Guaymas when I was eighteen years old.” 57 Because of her healing powers, la Santa attained a following among the Yaqui—these same Yaqui who then revolted. Here, there seems to exist a disconnection between Teresita’s avowed ethic and the actions of her followers.

There are a few possible ways to understand this disconnect. First, she may have articulated this ethic to her followers, but they simply did not follow it. This is certainly a possibility. Though a leader endowed with miraculous healing ability, Teresa was indeed a teenage girl. Second, she may have failed to adequately articulate this ethic to her followers. Again, as a young leader, though she talked to people about her theology and corresponding ethic, she may have simply not spoken forcefully enough to fully reject the revolution. Third, Teresa may here be publicly underplaying her role in the revolution. She may have indeed aided and even led aspects of the revolution, but now, perhaps fearing the Mexican government—even though she is no longer in Mexico—she refuses to implicate herself in the revolution that led to her imprisonment and exile. To some degree, each of these three possibilities may play a role in directing the explanation as to why she denies a role in the Yaqui revolution. However one might choose among the interpretive possibilities, it seems safest to say that Teresita’s explicit ethic—in some ways—was unsatisfactory within the conditions to bring about justice.58

Regardless of whether she engaged in the revolution, Teresita was imprisoned: “I was put in prison in Guaymas when I was eighteen years old—not in the jail, but in a private place opening on a cattle corral, where the mosquitoes ate me.” 59 She made sure to explain that she was not simply thrown into jail, but she seems to have been placed away from other prisoners, living near animals. These conditions, though, were poor in a different way; she specifically noted the harming of her body by mosquitoes. Seeing their leader under such conditions, “[t]he people gathered around [her] there and wanted to take [her] out.”60 The government relented, and her brother-in-law was able to remove her from her imprisonment and, importantly, Mexico itself. After being exiled within her country, her government then deported her. Especially because she denied her role in provoking revolt, she understood her exile to be unjust. But, of course, according to her ethic, the offender is the one who ought to admit the injustice.61

3.4.3. “God’s Laws”: Teresita’s Marriage

Though saints have often had a theological reason for chastity, Teresita had a theological reason for marrying: “[t]o marry… is one of God’s laws.”62 She certainly upset perceptions of her virgin sainthood. Her theological reasoning may be drawn from the Yaqui virtue of obligation.63 Laws appear to have played a key role in her ethical understanding, but what other laws might entail is beyond the given source (though asking forgiveness for offense could be formulated as a law, but, of course, she does not call it a “law” herself). Rather than construing divine laws in the Newtonian sense as modern Westerners often do, it may be better to understand the laws as obligations which an individual takes up for the sake of not offending God and humans. This, it seems, is a Yaqui-drawn sensibility.

Though she married out of love and duty, Teresita’s marriage was brief and disappointing. Just the previous month from the time of the interview, on the twenty-second of June, she wed Guadeloupe N. Rodriguez, a Mexican man she had known for eight months and, indeed, loved.64 “The next day after we were married he acted strangely; he tore up some things of mine, packed some of my clothes in a bundle, put it over his shoulder, and said to me, ‘Come with me!’”65 Against the advice of those seeing this event, Teresita began to follow him “not know[ing] where he wanted to go.”66 She was determined to follow her husband despite his strange behavior.67 Rodriguez started running and shooting a gun but was soon apprehended—although she only referred to the apprehenders as “they.”68 Immediately after their wedding, Teresita’s husband had been declared insane, and he was therefore imprisoned.

4. Conclusions

While this account need not be the final word on the development of Urrea’s theology and ethic—the remaining years of her life, though short, were quite eventful—it reveals how Teresita understood herself to be called by God to heal and in this way model Christ. The analysis of this paper has, furthermore, demonstrated that her Christ modeling was formed within an Amerindian social imaginary which distinguished between natural and humanly crafted worlds, emphasized obligations, and desperately needed healing and hope within the conditions of an oppressive government. Perhaps by means of disruption and dislocation, Urrea experienced a divine call from the “spirit of Love” to “do good” and “live in peace.” Urrea understood herself to be “do[ing] as Christ did.” While her explicit ethic regarding peace making proved unsatisfactory within the horrific conditions of the Porfiriato, la Santa was venerated as a kind of Mexican Joan of Arc. Her move to the US certainly did not end her divine mission of healing and following “God’s laws.” Yet ultimately, the duress of this mission may have been the death of her; at the cruciform age of thirty-three, she yielded her body to her maker. 69

In order to see Teresita as she understood herself, this essay has attended to Helen Dare’s 1900 interview. In so doing, it has become clear that Teresita understood herself to be a specially gifted person with a divine mission. That mission was formed and enacted within the complex social, religious, and geographical world in which she lived and moved, and she furthermore imagined herself to be emulating Christ within that world. Rather than falling back upon paradigms formed within Western scholarship, this essay has suggested that scholars interested in describing indigenized Christianities must begin from the words of the practitioners and the ground from which the movements began. While it cannot be neatly situated within an analytical frame, Urrea’s religion can be seen as a deeply indigenized Christianity. She was, in a way, Christ in Yaqui garb.